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Friday, October 10, 2014

Review: A new album by ‘sleeptalker’ Dion McGregor

It’s no surprise when a music label
comes up with a live recording of a major deceased comedian. The fact that we
can now hear more from renowned “sleeptalker” (read: monologist) Dion McGregor
is indeed a surprise, though, and a very pleasant one at that. If you’ve never
heard of McGregor (who died in 1994), I wrote a sort of “101” intro to him here. The short version of the story is that he was a songwriter and
playwright whose music never made him famous, but his penchant for talking in his
sleep did.

Legend has it that McGregor’s roommate Michael Barr was so
amazed by the crazed, imaginative monologues that Dion was dispensing while
asleep that he began to record them. He taped hours of these monologues, known
as “somniloquies,” and the result was an uncategorizable 1964 Decca LP called
The Dream World of Dion McGregor (He Talks in His Sleep) and
a book of “transcripts” of the dreams (also 1964), with memorable illustrations
by Edward Gorey.

As I noted in my last post about McGregor, I was very
surprised to find that additional CDs of previously unheard dreams had been
released in 1999 (Dion McGregor Dreams Again) and 2004
(The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor). The new release
is called Dreaming Like Mad and has been released by Torpor Vigil Records.

McGregor’s monologues range from playful
and silly to delightfully grim and even “sick” (in the manner of what was
called in the Fifties “sick humor” — foremost practitioner: Lenny Bruce,
namechecked in one dream here by Dion). McGregor is the monologist equivalent
of Charles Addams, sketching outlandish first-person scenarios in which
something unusual is happening and our narrator is either accepting it as
commonplace or growing steadily more uneasy, until his voice begins to rise and
he starts signaling the end of the piece (in keeping with the “sleeptalk”
mythology, this would be the point where Dion would awaken, or fall out of
bed).

There are 15 tracks on Dreaming Like Mad.
All are great, but a third of the entries are exemplary slice of weirdness. The
opening track sets the mood with Dion explaining how he and his friends have
disappeared into the Sunday New York Times. As is common
with McGregor’s dreams, this surreal transformation is recorded in a deadpan
fashion. Take a listen to this strange odyssey for free, courtesy of Torpor
Vigil Records.

A more “adult” dream finds Dion talking about a
woman whose face is located near her “snatch” — her obvious dream man being a
guy whose face is located in his crotch as well. Perhaps the most fitting entry
has a quartet tossing a disembodied head from person to person. McGregor’s
funniest monologues are always delivered with both an urgency and a sense of
childlike innocence, making the dark aspects even more ghoulish.

The piece that has the most urgency to it is Dion’s
invitation to join the “TYN” club. He implores a friend to come to a
demonstration at the New York Herald Tribune where everyone
will thumb their noses (thus the “TYN”) at dour film critic Judith Crist.

“There are big lists all made up, controversial people.
Everybody knows about TYN! You get your pin, you get a placard…. [The police] threatened
to put us in jail — we said ‘Come right ahead.’ We thumbed our noses. ‘TYN to
you too, police!’ That’s right… Oh well, I don’t know — it doesn’t accomplish
any good…” Dion then reveals that the club had a dilemma: one of the members
wanted to thumb his nose at Lenny Bruce. But since Lenny founded the club, they
just can’t do that (although they’re not racist — Eartha Kitt is also on their
list for a thumbing).

One of the finest nightmare scenarios on the album is a
refined gathering of couples. McGregor often “dreamed” deranged versions of
very straight suburban scenarios (Dion, for the record, was
gay). Cocktails or a meal are not the reason for this get-together, though —
this is an “execution party,” in which guests are drilled with a machine gun
and their bodies placed in piles. Always thinking of orderliness (even while
asleep?), Dion cautions a woman guest to calm down or “we’ll throw your body on
the female pile!”

Three things distinguish McGregor’s oddball
humor. The first is the fact that his monologues are delivered in a NYC
apartment late at night — there’s no audience, no laugh track, no “professional”
aspect to his performances. The second thing that makes McGregor unique is his
conversational tone, which makes it seems like the pieces are organically
growing as they continue. The last striking thing about his “somniloquies” is
the fact that these recordings serve as a peculiar portal to the past. Whether
he’s awake or asleep (more on that below), we’re hearing a man in his apartment
in the Sixties (his roommate recorded him from 1961-‘67) spinning these tales
as street sounds intrude on a regular basis.

As I mentioned in my last entry on McGregor, the
people who knew him firmly maintained that Dion was doing these monologues
while he was sound asleep. I find this extremely hard to believe, since his
dreams are not only uncannily linear (albeit wild, bizarre, surreal, and grim)
but they also explore the situation at hand from every possible angle (as an
author or comedian would, for maximum results).

Some of his dreams simply trail off and some end with his
trademark strangled scream — which his neighbors must’ve loved in the
late-evening hours — but some actually do have punchlines. A few of his monologues
also have the gradual revelation of some pivotal piece of information, as with
the revelation that “TYN” stands for “thumb your nose.”

I will admit that there is one thing that supports the
notion that he really was sleeping — the fact that he seemed unable to write
this kind of material in his “waking life.” My contention that McGregor’s
dreams seem pre-scripted (or at least pre-structured) is perhaps a reflection
of my own inability to have a linear, “conceptual” dream that comes anywhere
near the twisted poetry that Dion came up with. (His name, btw, was short for
“Dionysus” — it wasn’t pronounced like Mr. DiMucci.)

As I wrote this piece, I received a note from Steve Venright
of Torpor Vigil, which I will quote from here to offer the other side of the
story. After noting that McGregor’s previous roommate Carleton Carpenter (yes,
this guy) was bothered by Dion talking in his sleep, Steve notes “I have no
reason… to disbelieve the lovable Michael Barr when he told me, and many others
before, that the first recording he made of Dion was without his friend's
awareness, and that Dion was truly surprised the next morning when he heard the
extent to which he somniloquized. The dream tapes became a lifelong obsession
for Barr.

“Some of the unreleased recordings in the archive are
absolutely not the sounds of someone attempting to convey convincingly a
narrative. They're mumbled, moaned, delirious-sounding. They're not the ones
that make it onto track lists. Despite my own certainty that Dion was not in a
waking state or even merely in a ‘trance oratory’ state, I welcome discussion
on the matter of just where these emanations came from. It does seem impossible
that so many literary devices would be at play when someone's not consciously
producing the plot — but that, to me, is part of the absolute wonder of these
recordings and of the McGregor phenomenon.”

Whether McGregor’s dream-monologues represented an
unconscious form of “automatic writing,” or his friends and he created a
fanciful “package” for his ideas, doesn’t really matter in the long run. What
matters is that McGregor was a very creative humorist whose
visions of urban life and casual morbidity are unforgettable. Steve V. has
noted to me in correspondence that there are stil many more unheard
“somniloquies.” If they’re all as good as the items on Dreaming Like
Mad, that’s nothing to thumb your nose at.*****